Medicine: Patients' Prejudice

Discussions about the shortage of doctors and the poor distribution of
them invariably get around to un used woman power. Then accusatory
fingers are pointed at medical schools and the profession's elders for
having long discouraged women from en tering the field. However, this
kind of discrimination has begun to fade (see box opposite), giving
rise to a new question: Will patients welcome an increasing number of
female physicians? A large part of the public apparently will not.

A startling degree of bias was turned up last year by Dr. Edgar
Engleman, who studied...